Fit For a Queen
by Elyan White
Summary: The Innocence needed more than her blood to sustain itself. Lenalee makes a decision, and now has to live with covering up the damage.


**Content warnings for...really messed up things. Graphic violence/aftermath of violence, gore, extra gore, disturbing themes.**

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You wouldn't have known it to look at her, but Lenalee was starving. She had been starving for months, yearning and lacking. Eating didn't make a difference-it was something about her blood, something that she had lost when it all poured out of her body to crystallize around her legs and that had been replaced with something else when it ran back into her veins. It was a slow thing, and an ugly thing-it was just that it didn't show on the outside.

On the outside she was dainty but not too skinny, petite but not frail, and, under her coat, an hourglass rather than a stick. She was healthy, young, blossoming; her feet tucked into her slim red shoes like little white birds with their feathers all pulled in, and her Innocence bouncing above them like ruby haloes.

Not even Lenalee would have known it, just to look at herself in her vanity mirror, and the kind of looking she did was close and fearful.

But that fear was not of anything so tangible as death. No, she did not fear losing weight or brittle hair or the thought of constant pain until finally her body could not even generate feeling anymore. What scared Lenalee most was the _hunger_. It was an un-filling of herself, emptiness climbing up out of her belly and into her throat. And what scared her about it was that it wasn't _her_ hunger.

The Parasitic types were like that-Allen always needed more food than he could possibly hold just to keep up with the energy output his Innocence demanded of him, and though Krory made do with less outrageous portions, he had admitted that he was never truly full until he had consumed the blood of at least a score of Akuma. The longer he waited, he'd confided, the more ravenous he became, and he was afraid that if he ever waited too long he might begin to black out like he had when his Innocence had first awakened.

"I fear above all else that I will lose control of my actions again," Lenalee remembered Krory telling her. "And I fear it even more because I know that it could happen."

Lenalee, of course, was not a Parasitic-type, but from what she had discovered so far about being a Crystal-type, the two had a lot in common. This was, of course, assuming that one type of Innocence always behaved the same, which any scientist would tell you with exhausted despair was simply not the case.

But one thing was consistently true: Parasitic Innocence required something from its Exorcist. Their energy, their will, their body parts-and that was where Lenalee believed lay both the greatest difference and similarity between Parasitic and Crystal, because her Innocence, too, now had a toll that must be paid.

It was just that, for a while, she hadn't even known what it was.

She _had_ known, she supposed, in some part of her. But that part of her was the little girl who went to press her face into her knees and away from the truth. That little girl was the part of Lenalee who was never quite as optimistic or as able to get back on her feet again, so Lenalee usually tried to keep her quiet. In fact, she tried to pretend that girl wasn't a part of her most of the time.

But she wished she'd paid more attention to that girl. Because if she had, then maybe she could have recognized the warnings-maybe she could have…fallen out of the sky a little too hard, or broken her brother's heart or betrayed the Order, so that no one would mind quite as much if she died. It was too late now, though, for her to die, because she'd already given in, and if they looked at her body, or looked through the things she left behind, she was convinced that they would find some stray stain or some dust from somewhere they hadn't thought she'd been and then, _then_ …

She couldn't leave them with that. Not from her. Not her boys.

It had been too late for Lenalee Lee as soon as she'd taken the solo mission in the town that didn't have a name, and it had been too late as soon as the human-shaped Akuma shattered wetly into half-metal chunks and she was soaked red and copper-smelling and it _wasn't an Akuma_. As soon as she'd taken to the air, dizzy and shivering in her jacket that was quickly cooling to a squelching cold, as soon as she'd felt like she was falling off her axis because the smell of blood meant Innocence to her now and by some irony meant _comfort_ that her instincts wouldn't reject, Lenalee had been doubly damned.

It had been a terrible mission-or at least, all Lenalee remembered were terrible things. There had been blood running into her mouth and the thought that the taste was _wrong_ , and then she hadn't been able to stop thinking about all of the blood that must be in a human body, and then she just found herself thinking about…bodies. Human bodies and wrong tastes.

She came home and there were condoling words and sunken, understanding eyes all around, but the taste was still there and it was more real than the smiles Allen and Lavi tried to put on for her. And that taste, she soon discovered, was more real than even the food she put in her mouth-and she was _hungry_.

It was at this point that Lenalee concluded she might be a little more like Krory than Allen.

After several long nights of sleepless staring into her mirror at the bones that were sharpening in her face, at the emaciation that only she could see taking hold, she faced herself grim and honest there. Amongst all the self-loathing that makeup couldn't hide, she managed to resolve that, yes, she cared more for her friends who struggled to live than for strangers who were already dead. And she could not fight for those friends if she could not survive the trials of her Innocence.

And so, on the night she decided, she blinked her eyes hard to find them wide and too white around their edges, and to find that her answer had been made clear to her. Lenalee stood from her vanity table on legs that shook under her with the weakness of need, and her Innocence seemed to her to rattle around her ankles, like shackles.

She kept herself together through the next day (or maybe it was two or three or ten), and kept her head down, thinking of what she was going to do in equal measures of anxiety and anticipation, each turn sending a squirming repulsion through her until she took her next mission, and she insisted she was fine until her brother sent her out alone-extermination, again, with only one Finder.

It felt good to fly and destroy (better, at least, than sitting in the Order surrounded by her own face in the windows and the faces of all the people who couldn't see what was wrong with her), but the whole time, her thoughts ran around and around in her head like blood, _to_ blood.

Blood, blood, blood- _not_ blood, _more_ than blood.

And then the mission was over and the Finder was dead and Lenalee couldn't bring herself to be surprised when her heels cracked down like thunder onto the earth, just near the spot where the battle had discarded him.

His eyes were open. She wished they would blink.

Blinking would mean he was alive and that she wouldn't be able to go through with her decision, and then she wouldn't have to suffer the reproach of a dead man's eyes watching her. She could not close them herself-to close them would be to humanize the corpse, and to humanize herself, which she could not stand to do right now.

In fact, she could barely stand at all, here on this precipice of her own making. The Akuma she had just killed seemed like a very distant memory. The Exorcist in her was gone entirely. Had there ever been anything else she worried about but ending the hunger? She had known this man before this mission, though she had been too distracted to talk to him much during it. He had a name that she had known for nearly half a year, but there was nothing in his dead face that could remind her.

His face was waxy, bloody on one side and a little bit crushed over the spot on his forehead where the metal lamppost had hit him-probably when one of _her_ windstorms had torn it up; she could identify it because there was a red smear and a bit of hair on the black, bent post lying not far away-and despite all that there was an innocence held in his features with the life emptied out of them, something unassuming, almost, for did one ever truly expect death when they did not know what it was like?

That made it…harder. But her shackles, her shackles held her to the spot, and to her resolve. Lenalee felt that she was drowning on land, and also that something was gnawing and burrowing from her insides towards her outsides, hollowing her out right to her fingertips.

She dropped down in a heap, her ruffled coat becoming dusty at its edges, her long socks-blue and girlish, today, what had she been thinking?-grinding into the ground where her knees hit. Perhaps that was a tooth under her, perhaps the mud was red instead of brown. But what was a little more dirt on her, a little more gore?

The girl in Lenalee's head screamed silently at the closeness as, with a tentative hand that grasped numbly like an infant's, she found his arm. The sleeves of the Finder uniforms were not as short as they had used to be-these sleeves, Lenalee had to roll up herself, shakily jerking the blood-stuck cuff away from the limp wrist, which was flecked with dirt.

He was recent dead, not-quite-cold dead. A sort of after-death oiliness stuck intangibly to her fingertips, a peculiar feel of almost-damp that she both was and was not aware of. Lenalee shivered, or perhaps convulsed-it was the sort of shudder that said something was trying to get out from under her skin, or maybe something was just trying to fit its form into her skin for the first time.

Lenalee knew what she wanted. She flipped the arm over to find the softer underside of the wrist, and she grazed her nails in shaky lines over the clustered, purpled veins. She wondered why she wasn't crying.

She didn't know how to begin-and then the world got a little darker around the edges and suddenly she _did_.

No nails-this was something that needed _teeth_.

That had been many, many missions ago. Two or three or ten. And that brought her to where she was now-here, on her knees again. It seemed, as an Exorcist, she always wound up there eventually.

Lenalee had learned to be glad that she hadn't cried, the first time-there was simply no use in it for her now. And besides, any tears she had left in her would have been wasted back then. Because things were much, much worse now.

Now, she needed much, much more just to fill herself enough to stop the dizzy, white flashes of pain and light-headedness from splitting her skull, let alone leave her sated. Lenalee could not recall if, in her entire life, she had _ever_ been full. She could hardly even force down more than a few bites at a time of Jerry's lovingly cooked food without throwing it back up in long, wrenching bouts later, and she had for the most part given up on trying. Not because she had become any less acutely paranoid about giving her ugly new self away, not even remotely, but because, God, to see the things she brought _up_ now-

Another battlefield, another dust-settling silence, another aftermath that left black metal in huge shards among the city rubble-another mission that left Lenalee alone.

Alone with the bodies.

She was getting better at this, really-which was to say, at being worse. She had learned not to cry and she had learned to do _this_ -slipping lumps of slippery meat past her lips, swallowing it like bloody, body-warm mana.

Ask and ye shall receive, indeed, but she hadn't asked for this. She hadn't asked for _any_ of this, and if she could ask for something she would ask for her brother, but she knew he wouldn't want her like she was now.

Partake, and partake. The only thing that made her any sort of "whole" was these little pink packages squeezing down her esophagus. The only thing that could make her existence tangible was feeling all the flesh heavy and compacted inside her, pressing sinew and fat into the sides of her, filling her, flooding her. Its warm weight and its sour strings in her teeth _satiated_ her.

Lenalee, on the days when she did not scream through her own teeth and mouthfuls of those wrong tastes she had come to know, _relished_.

She lived in between red realities and gray realities, the hunger and the hiding. She treasured the gray reality more than the other, of course, but she no longer felt a part of it.

She had by now become so paranoid of the smell on her that she told everyone she was trying different perfumes as an excuse for the stronger scents she was using. Lavi had started to bring her back bottles of the most exotic samples he could find, and it bothered Allen enough that he had started doing it too, since he knew what sort of things Cross's women seemed to like ("Not that I think you're a prosti-I mean, not that I think you're that kind of girl! Really!"). Even Kanda became a part of it, grumbling at her about what flowers were known for being too obnoxious-smelling and how her maturity would be suited to something more understated, and then running off before anyone could realize he'd done something thoughtful.

Lenalee would dutifully try each one, even the ones that made her sneeze, because that was how much it meant to her, and she would ask Komui if he preferred that day's or the previous one when she brought him his coffee in the morning-and of course, he would answer with a wide, silly smile that the best perfume in the world was her fresh-brewed coffee, and that nothing in the world could make her more perfect than she already was.

She loved her boys. She loved them so much she could die for them and be happy she'd done it. But she didn't think that they would love her so much if they knew about what she was using their gifts for.

These gifts, she knew, were not even really meant for her-they were meant for their Lenalee, not the thing that had eaten her blood and her mind and then snapped up her soul, too. They were not meant for the Lenalee that was no longer even susceptible to the Akuma virus-one more thing she couldn't tell them.

She should have felt grateful, she supposed, but all she could feel was despair that there was one more thing that she _wasn't_ anymore. How many ways could you dehumanize an Exorcist? Imprisonment did that, indoctrination did that, alienation, isolation, and paranoia did that. But what even to call this?

What could she possibly call her reasons for knowing how the virus felt when it was burning from her inside out as it neutralized? The blacks stars, churning in the acid of her stomach-she knew what it did because she had seen it, oozing out of humans with their whole fronts raked open by the graceless execution of an Akuma, setting up a smell and eating slowly into their skin, or seeping out and defiling their cooling innards.

These were her vices-what made up her life, and what chained her to it. They were one in the same.

And then one day, Kanda asked her about it-what the Crystal Innocence did to its Accommodators. And not for her, either. For himself.

It wasn't outright, but in a way that he knew she would recognize if she had the answers. Kanda was only willing to reveal as much as he thought she knew already, and she didn't blame him. But she didn't answer him, either. She had dark suspicions that the thing the Innocence was doing to her-the thing it was making her into-was not really the Innocence's doing at all. She had suspicions that if Kanda didn't know about her, his mind would not even take him to such a place, and he wouldn't suffer the consequences-or perhaps he would just suffer differently.

And so Lenalee recited to him exactly what the Science Department would say, and watched him scratch fitfully at his arms throughout the day, knowing that if she had noticed, than Lavi surely would too. Let it be him who faced whatever price the Innocence demanded of Kanda.

Yet no one seemed to notice her. They called the red staining of her lips a product of natural beauty, her disinterest in regular meals some endearment of her femininity. The secrecy of it was like a poisonous snake trying to writhe from her grasp-she couldn't keep hold of it forever, but to release it would only bring about fear and anger and accusation.

The hunger was a sickness that couldn't be cured, and Lenalee was afraid of it-but not half as much as she was afraid the sickness wasn't real.

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 ***Breaks out of inactivity like a beluga whale breaching the surface for oxygen***

 **I LIVE.**

 **As promised, more scary!Lenalee. This woman inspires me for all the wrong reasons.**

 **Anyway, Hymns for Dead Hearts is under some rather elaborate reconstruction, but you can expect milder, cuter Lenalee coming up in that. Thank you very much to all who read, doubly to all who review, and of course, to all who write. Apologies for...whatever this is in the meantime.**

 **Until Hymns for Dead Hearts (or possibly another really messed up character piece, who knows). Cheers!**


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